Australian National Photographic Portrait Prize 2021

[lynnb]

Australia's National Portrait Gallery conducts an annual National Photographic Portrait Prize competition. In 2021, 79 finalists were selected from over 3000 entries.

I'm not going to Canberra so I can't comment on the prints. Nor would I travel to see these. What has me curious is that quite a few of the entries don't seem to be portraits, as I understand the term. Some are straight reportage. Some are the backs of people from a distance.

I admit to being partial to Jane Bown's portraiture. I like to see people's faces and expression in a portrait. Above all I like to see their eyes. Maybe I'm just out of touch.

Here's the winning image and the finalists.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

 

[Danny D]

Looking at the winner especially, I really wonder how that is a portrait.. a portrait of the landscape perhaps, but then aren't all landscape photos portraits of landscapes? By that logic, does Bruce Gilden make landscapes of people?


On a positive note, some of the entrees are very striking and beautiful. Those kids in the field - wow.

 

[Darthfeeble]

The title of the competition seems to be "Living Memory", that would give a bunch of latitude I suppose.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

I'm more on HCB "Inner silence" side of portraits. But I do have Jane Bown book as well.

Organizers choose wrong time for portraits during Covid. So folks send them lonely candids instead.

 

[bluesun267]

There's some haunting and interesting images here.

Being almost exclusively a film shooter, I'm a little reticent to enter into the images deeply because of the way in which the majority of them wear their "digital-ness"-- it doesn't feel natural.

What I mean is the extreme form of dodging and burning where contrast relationships between subject/background are severely 'evened' out. (See "NYE2020" "The Salway Family" and "Task at Hand" "A Girl and Her Boy" as the most obvious examples). But it is in 95% of these images to one degree or another.

This is strictly my aesthetic sense, and sorry if I appear to be raining on this parade. I know photography is not reality and basically any aesthetic tradition or trend is purely a human construct, and thus none can claim to be more natural or artificial than the other...my 'likes' no more relevant than the next guy

 

[agentlossing]

This one: https://www.portrait.gov.au/npppphoto/97808/

It doesn't look like me or my house (I am younger, and my house isn't very cluttered) but it's somehow a portrait of what I look like inside my own head.

 

[charjohncarter]

I guess many of them could be called environmental portraits. But then like lynnb maybe I'm out of touch too. And like bluesun276 extreme digital manipulation isn't my thing; in most of these it is too obvious (like heavy HDR was a fad a decade ago).

 

[robert blu]

Busy days here ! I had time just to give a very quick look (I'll come back perhaps tomorrow) but I feel a little confused by what I see.

Honestly I feel oft confused when I look at the rsuklts of the various photoghraphy contests, competicions, prizes...I oft ask myself where is photography going? Or maybe I'm too old to understand it.

But, again only a quick look some of the photos are interesting 🙂

 

[Shab]

Today has been the second time I have been looking at these pictures... and I agree with you.

It's like human is small, the subject is small... maybe because of COVID19 we have begun to see ourselves smaller than before, when people thought being human was like being little Gods...

Or maybe, as you said, photography is becoming something I don't understand... because I think there are some pictures that aren't portraits nor environmental portraits... or maybe I don't know (I don't say it ironically).

 

[nickthetasmaniac]

I really enjoyed them, but then I’ve always found environmental portraiture (ie. people in place) far more compelling than straight portraiture (ie. just people). I think the winning shot is superb, and loses nothing by showing the subjects back.

 

[rhl-oregon]

I wonder if the submissions and the jurying reflect a larger change in values—away from headshot, torso-and-bust portraiture, toward giving the surroundings equal say. As in, who you are depends on where you are, what encompasses you, how you arrange your stillness and actions within the array of immediate matter. I write it this way so as not to preclude, for instance, Winston Churchill’s solemn sulk at having his prop-cigar snatched away—he still gets his expensive chair and tailored clothes—but to suggest that more photographers, perhaps a far greater proportion of photographers now, are concerned with cultural and environmental framing, to the extent of diminishing the individual in order to emphasize, for instance, that a roomful of books make a life, or that this woman is an apparition mostly submerged in water and shadows.

Consider, as an idiopathic but apparently universal alternative, the vast choking crowd-sourcing of selfies and faceys, posted day after day. There, in some way, the traditional privilege of portraiture has been flipped into a mass commodification of mere self-annunciation that as often as not excludes all surrounding, context, environment. In some sense, then, these Australian images relate/react to that sheer landfill of selfieness, as awful but cheerful as it is.

Yes, I’d still take Avedon’s (uncomfortably close) bust of William Casby over most of these, even without its well-known caption about his being born a slave. But as a non-Australian I appreciate the variety and distinctions in the surroundings. How different is it, really, from “The Family of Man” and its offshoots that formed my early education in documentary/ portrait photography (aside from my evidently incurable but benign addiction to black and white)?

I’d be interested in similar threads (and RFF thoughts) about how other countries and cultures valorize contemporary photographic portraiture. There’s bound to be stuff that’s destructive, disruptive, reactive, and stuff that affirms the long traditions of portrayal. Let’s compare Germany, Argentina, Vietnam, etcetera.

 

[kangaroo2012]

I have been going to see the Portrait prize in Sydney for many years lynnb and I think charjohn carter is correct. More environmental portrait than old fashioned portraits my Great Grandfather used to make at Falk studios in Sydney in the 1920s.
Nothing wrong but different.
Paintings are heading out of my understanding too. Perhaps it is age related but it is different for differences sake.
My daughter , who is an art historian would argue this for days.
Cheers
Philip